The Wisdom Pattern: Order, Disorder, Reorder

by Richard Rohr

Faith, frankly, demands faith —not proof, certitude, predictability, control, or the comforts of authority assuring us that we are always right. Our temptation is often to create a non-relational Christianity and non-relational leadership styles, so we can have all the bases covered by custom and statute, and don’t ever have to enter into the scandal of particularity. Prayer, perhaps more than anything, is the school of relationship and particularity. We should be the experts in these areas—if we are people of prayer.

The hunger for meaning and the need for hope in this deconstructed society cannot be satisfied by merely private choices. This is a real blind spot for most liberals. The issues are too big and we cannot stand alone against such a dominant cultural collapse. Corporate evil can only be overcome by corporate good. For this reason, and many others, I’m very happy to see the growth of small groups in church and in society.

The normal pattern that I find in mythology and story is that the healthy person always begins with idealism, heroism, and black-and-white worldviews, and then moves toward nuance, compassion, exception, patience, tolerance, and wisdom. We now have it backward: People begin with no boundaries or identity and then overreact by the middle of life and need all kinds of fundamentalist certitudes, clarity, order, and absolute authority!

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), the great American essayist, said “nothing great is ever achieved without enthusiasm.”19 What a deconstructed culture lacks, because of its deep cynicism and pessimism about reality, is a basic confidence and enthusiasm that is necessary to start almost anything. We cannot begin with mere criticism or againstness—or it finally turns against our own group (witness the later stages of most angry revolutions, even much of the work of the Protestant Reformation, and the new Catholic reactionaries who are already splitting over who is more orthodox). The brittle or negative personality finally breaks against itself and its own type. We can only build on life, not on death.

I said in Chapter Two, it is the easiest thing in the world to point out what is wrong, who is wrong, and to stand on a pedestal of superiority—without doing anything positive or becoming a positive answer ourselves. After we deconstruct, what are we actually for? An awful lot of activists on the left and reactionaries on the right have no positive vision, nothing they believe in, no one they are in love with. They are just overwhelmed with what’s wrong and think that by eliminating the so-called “contaminating element,” the world will be pure and right again.

The postmodern mind has too little respect (re-spicere, “to look again”), too little ability to look again at what it has too easily dismissed. Both superficial science and much secular education have limited themselves to only partial seeing.

In our men’s spirituality work, we call that suffering, in its transformed state, “the sacred wound,” a concept drawn from classical mythology, but also from the Christ story. In mythology, the would-be hero is always wounded. The word innocent (innocens, “not yet wounded”) is not a complimentary term in mythology. The puer is the young boy who refuses to be wounded, or, more exactly, refuses to recognize and suffer the wounds that are already there. He’s just going to remain nice and normal, so everybody will accept him. In our culture, he might smugly remain white and middle class, healthy, “sinless,” Catholic, pretty, and happy, maybe even drive a classy car or wear the latest clothing. He refuses to let things fall apart. He refuses to be wounded, much less to allow the humiliating wound to become sacred and sanctifying. Yet, I personally believe that the Gospels are saying there is no other way to know something essential.

What we have now in the West, by and large, is embittering wounds. The spiritual “machine” for turning wounds into glory has been lost by a secular people. Yet all the great mythologies and mystics tell us that we will be wounded, we must be wounded. It is what we do with the wounding that makes all the difference.

We shouldn’t be too surprised at the common antagonisms within the church. We always hate truth when it’s too close to us. We are always most capable of hating the people who are closest to us. We all know that the greatest antipathies are often between husband and wife, parent and child, Christian and other Christian. The mirror revealing our own shadow is held too close to our face. The church’s closeness to Christ carries with it that same peril. It carries the weight of this great Christ mystery, and it knows what Christ will demand of the soul.

I had once assumed that the “head office” would naturally be my backup, encouragement, and support. Many times it has been, as long as the stretch is not too far, so I am still grateful for this Church, which both mothers me and maddens me. My human mother did the same.

So, what must we surrender? Anxiety would be the natural starting place. I admit that takes a lot of letting go—and it takes all our life to begin to get there. In fact, we cannot get there at all—we are led, seduced, and drawn by the endless subterfuges of God. God, like a thief, steals our addictions from us. We can go back and work for justice, peace, and truth, but it will be a new self doing it—and, we hope, in a new and creative, win/win way.

I’ve recommended to a lot of people Bill McKibben’s book, The Age of Missing Information.

The mother and the father are clearly the priests of the meal. The sacred is located in the domestic, everyday world.

“It is a narrow gate and a hard road that leads to life, and only a few find it” (Matthew 7:13–14).

So, a change can force a transformation. Spiritual transformation always includes a usually disconcerting reorientation. It can either help people to find a new meaning or it can force people to close down and slowly turn bitter. The difference is determined precisely by the quality of our inner life, our spirituality.

In moments of insecurity and crisis, shoulds and oughts don’t really help; they just increase the shame, guilt, pressure, and likelihood of backsliding. It’s the deep yeses that carry us through. It’s that deeper something we are strongly for that allows us to wait it out. It’s someone in whom we absolutely believe and to whom we commit. In plain language, love wins out over guilt any day. It is sad that we settle for the short-run effectiveness of shaming people instead of the long-term life benefits of true transformation. But then, we are a culture of product and efficiency, not terribly patient with growth.

The order was typically (1) the Divine Realm, (2) the realm of heaven and angels, (3) the human, (4) the animal, (5) the vegetable, (6) the waters and minerals in the earth, and (7) the earth itself, which held them all together. These were all linked in purpose, meaning, and sacredness.

Either we see God in everything or we have lost the basis for seeing God in anything.

Once the dualistic mind takes over, the ego is in a “pick, choose, and decide” game, which is the beginning of exclusionary, punishing, and even violent religion. Remember, anthropologically, religion begins with the making of a distinction between the pure and the impure. Jesus consistently ignores such a distinction. In fact, it is at the heart of almost half of his gospel actions!

For postmodernism, on the other hand, everything is relative. (That, of course, is ultimately indefensible, because if everything is relative then that principle is relative too.) Because the contemporary mind has decided that everything is relative instead of relational (a theistic or personalized universe), it forces the individual to manufacture (“make by hand”) his or her own greatness. Perhaps we have confused relative with relational. Relative thinking allows us to dismiss or decrease the energy in everything; relational think...

We are no longer living in a wisdom culture when even age does not lead to foundation and ground.

Postmodernism ends up with what some call reductionism. We can no longer start from the top and find universal meaning reflected through all of creation. Everything is disconnected, standing on its own, unable to validate itself apart from itself.

Everything is diminished and demystified. So, the best we can normally do is take the lowest level that we can control and understand and move up from there—if we can move up at all. The language of the reductionist often...

Our worldview does not care about greater histories, greater philosophies, greater thinkers, or about anything much except the market world of buying and selling. All of us, even Christians, usually find ourselves trapped inside of exchange values instead of inherent values.

do not disagree, for example, with the feminist critique that we have not heard from women very much in history (or minorities, or gays, or the poor, or the losers of any category, for that matter), but are we really going to say that Aristotle and Erasmus were not gifts to humanity because they happened to be male, or that Johanna Doe has the truth now because she is a woman?

These understandable but knee-jerk reactions to new insights make new ideas more deconstructive than constructive. They only put in place another ten-year period of over-defensiveness and over-compensation. We don’t have time for that anymore.

In a certain sense, we had a deconstructionist attitude from the beginnings of the American Revolution, never trusting higher class or culture, or that there might be a good meaning to “nobility.” Yet, it was noble-minded men and women who fortunately led us beyond an anti-England or anti-anything perspective to a positive and visionary American Project. In general, deconstructionist attitudes are only helpful for initial clarity and focus. Of themselves, they provide no positive or creative foundation upon which to build for the long term.

Skepticism and criticism are fail-safe protection measures for the psyche, but when they dominate, something deeper and more important has been abdicated. The human qualities of deference, patience, humility, risk-taking, and social grace are also needed for culture and its continuance. Humans grow in such a garden. Jesus does not encourage or expect a world where people are never hurt, or never suffer guilt or injustice. His entire concern is what we do with mistakes when they happen— always knowing that they will.

After you’ve loved and failed a few times, you become afraid to love again. After you have suffered, as the world has suffered through the hundred million humans killed in war in the twentieth century, you are sure to create ways to protect yourself so that you will not have to suffer again. Postmodernism is a way out: no commitments, no surrenders, no absolute anything, no passion for anything—and, therefore, no disappointment, no hurt. On a certain level it makes sense, but, through the lessons of the Crucified, we are learning a different way. We can’t avoid persecution. In fact, our assumption is that Jesus’s lifestyle will probably lead to some new forms of persecution.

As Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914) said, a Conservative is “a statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.”34

The steps to maturity, in fact, are always steps through immaturity. There is no other way, but when we do not realize the limited capacities of a machine, we try to make it into something more than it is. We make it a monument, a closed system operating inside of its own, often self-serving, logic.

Jeremiah rails against such formalization at the beginning of his prophecy: “Put no trust in delusive words like, ‘the temple, the temple, the temple!’ While you follow alien gods... . I am not blind—it is Yahweh who speaks” (see 7:4–11).

The secret is to know how to keep in touch with the man and movement stages, without being naïve about the necessity of some machine and the inevitability of those who love monuments. We must also be honest: All of us love monuments when they are monuments to our man, our movement, or our machine.

When Jesus called his disciples, he also called them away from their jobs and their families (see, for example, Matthew 4:22). Now, jobs and families don’t sound like bad things, do they? He called them to leave their nets because as long as anyone is tied to job security, there are a lot of things they cannot see and cannot say. This is one of the great recurring disadvantages of clergy earning their salary from the church, and perhaps why Saint Francis did not want us to be ordained priests.

Jesus called the disciples away from their natural families too. If there’s another blindness that keeps us from bigger truth—an even more sacred cow than job—it is family. Families are either very good or very bad for human growth but, in either case, they are only runways for takeoff. As others have said, family provides roots, but the wings have to come from elsewhere.

Most of our men have not made many journeys away from “Mama”—and maternal churches and companies.39 Because men have not undergone their spiritual journey, many spend the rest of their lives trying to marry Mama (ask many wives), afraid of any real intimacy with women, or needing the security systems that Mama always provides.

So, instead, Francis of Assisi went out to the edge and did it better. Francis respected the monuments, even loved them, but also went back to the original dynamism and nonviolent style of Jesus the man for his inspiration.

the best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better.

The Ignorant Perfection of Ordinary People.

Constructive Postmodernism! This is exactly what we are talking about here: People who know the challenges but build anyway. This is not naïve denial, not Pollyanna idealism, not utopianism, but the true biblical hope that is received only on the other side of suffering and failure.

My assumption is that at one point they were “unbuilt,” stripped down to the core, and learned how to live from that clear and humbled point.

By very traditional wisdom or moral realism, I refer to qualities or states of being such as silence, solitude, detachment, honesty, confession, forgiveness, and radical humility. No new author or book is going to do better than these. We hope any new material will just help us understand them better.

I cannot copy from someone else’s homework. I can only be inspired by it, which is a good start.

Our knowledge of God is participatory. God refuses to be intellectually “thought,” and is only known in the passion and pain of it all, when the issues become soul-sized and worthy of us. Saint Catherine of Genoa (1447–1510), a laywoman and mystic, is supposed to have asked Jesus, in one of her locutions, why there is so much pain and suffering on the earth. Jesus responded that, if there was any other way, he would have thought of it.

There’s no other way we learn how to let go and discover compassion, it seems. There is no other way that we will give up control until we are led to the limits of our own resources—and must rel...

The modern, and now postmodern, world is the first period of history where a large number of people have been allowed to take their private lives and identities seriously. Many of our parents did not even have a language for it. There is a wonderful movement into individuation here, but there is also a diminishment and fragility if that is all we have. (Individuation, by the way, is a positive word to describe an appropriate sense of self, ego, and boundaries. Individualism, however, refers to the exaggerated sense of self, ego, and overprotected boundaries.)

In this first dome is my private life: those issues that make me special, inferior or superior, right or wrong, handicapped or gifted, depending on how “I” see it. “I” and my feelings and opinions are the reference point for everything. We must let go of exactly this in early prayer practice, and yet this is the very tiny and false self that contemporary people take as normative, and even sufficient.

My Story is not big enough or true enough to create large or meaningful patterns by itself. But many people live their whole lives at this level of anecdote and nurtured self-image, without ever connecting with the larger domes of meaning. They are what they have done and what has been done to them—nothing more. You can see how fragile and unprotected, and therefore constantly striving, this self will be. It is very easily offended, fearful, and therefore often posturing and pretentious.

“When mythic material remains latent, unused and unexplored, it can lead to pathological behavior.”41 This small and fragile self needs to be a part of something more significant—and so it creates dramas, tragedies, and victimhoods to put itself on a larger stage. Just watch American television, where trivia and drivel are raised to an art form— as much by the news, political commentators, and religious programming as by the easily criticized talk shows.

This Is Us (Our Story)